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Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, Mandel's Officer's Manual, and a couple discussions on other pages got me to think about how much I loved these as a kid. I poured over these until they fell apart. I made notes in them. I planned one day to make my own. Well, that's pretty much a cut and paste job.

Originally, I was just going to update the books and supplement them with color pictures, print and simple binding. Then it snowballed. Why stop there? Why limit myself? Design my own ship. Don't like that bridge? Replace it with another one.

So I was going to take the best parts from both (and a couple other books) and make the ultimate fan manual ... but it got too big. And now it looks like two volumes.

Has anyone else ever done this? Any advice for the newbie? Should I make it one huge volume, or two books -- one as a guide to the ship and another as an officer's manual/textbook?

Did it back in 87'. Cut, paste, sketch and photocopy. Borrowed heavily from the manuals you mentioned as well as the Enterprise Flight Manual that had sketches of the TMP/WOK/SFS era consoles. That was pre photoshop, so no real tips there...

We created the ORION PRESS Lexicon which has only material from TOS, TAS, TMP-GEN, and the material from our fan fiction. Thing ran over 300 pages, and we sold 4. LOL I also have a notebook of collected articles from various magazines and fanzines that give a lot of details of stuff I actually refer to (consoles, uniforms, ships, etc.) during production.

I´ve been thinking about making one for some twenty years now, but never made it beyond the early planning stage.

In mine, I´d focus mostly on Starfleet, with a lot of starship drawings I make myself, and try to stay pretty close to what we get from TOS and the first movies, with only very few fictional designs.

But as Potemkin_Prod said, there really isn´t a market anymore for hardcopy manuals like that, when there´s so much stuff easily available on the internet. So you´d be doing it just for yourself, basically. But of course that can be fun and worth the effort, too

It's all just for me, just for fun. I finally decided on a Sovereign class that has a lot of extras. Created some of my own rooms, borrowed heavily, etc. Like I said, it's just for me.

Found uniforms I liked. Some different interiors. Just wish I could have found a better phaser. My 3-D art is lacking. I never liked the dustbuster phaser design.

I'll post my table of contents. Maybe get some feedback.

Yeah, DestinyCaptain, I've been collecting Trek materials since I was a kid. This manual would have a great diagram. That manual would have a better one. And I was always a sucker for the unofficial stuff. Years ago I had xeroed a lot of stuff and cut, pasted, then copied again. This time, in digital, and I'm pleased with things. I guess it's one of those personal things.